Looking Towards The Heavens

Like many others today I was glued to watching the NASA livestream of the Artemis 2 splashdown, with a bit of extra nervousness due to the concerns about the spacecraft’s heatshield. It was a perfect splashdown, but getting the astronauts back to the recovery ship was taking a while, so I went for my late afternoon walk. It was sprinkling a bit, so I grabbed my raincoat and walked where I could have a good view of the eastern sky to see this wonderful double rainbow.

Riverfront Outing

Today I went on a little outing to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, walking to the museum from the Sacramento train station via Old Sacramento and the riverfront. Old Sacramento is the most touristy area in Sacramento; it developed during the Gold Rush. Since I have been reading a lot about Northern California history in the latter half of the 19th century and pondering the Gilded Age fortunes that were made during that period, it’s neat to see the actual storefront where Collis Huntington and Mark Hopkins made their wealth off miners needing supplies. This is a sketch looking west across the Sacramento River downstream from the Tower Bridge.

Turkey In The Dell

I went to today’s Davis sketchcrawl which was at the eastern end of the Arboretum. My main sketch for the day was of a wooden shade structure with trees in the background, but once I finished the sketch I turned around and saw several turkeys at close range, one of which was displaying prominently.

Backyard Ceanothus

There is a ceanothus shrub just in our backyard right up against the wall of the house that is now in flower. I don’t know what variety this is, not being particularly up on my horticultural ceanothuses. (When I lived in Santa Barbara I knew the local wild species of ceanothus pretty well.) I sketched this with the Derwent Inktense pan color set — I like the way the colors turned out.

The Elusive Bushtit

I’m continuing to try photographing the urban avifauna of Davis, and am learning how bird species differ in their challenges in photographing them. Bushtits are pretty common, but move through shrubbery in a very active flock. It is quite hard to catch one in the viewfinder before it disappears behind a branch. Still, yesterday I walked through the Arboretum and managed to take several good frames of bushtits in a flock at eye level.

Pica and I have a joke that bushtit flocks always come in sizes that are prime numbers.

Urban Rabbit

I am continuing to practice a bit of bird photography by strolling around the neighborhood with my 75-300mm lens. But not all urban wildlife are birds. This is a cottontail rabbit that likes to hide under the shrubbery near the Davis Senior Center. He clearly is finding plenty to eat there.

Enric the Adventurer

Thanks to the vicissitudes of the YouTube algorithm, I have discovered the channel Enric Adventures which has the possibility of entertaining me with Catalan language content for years into the future. This is the channel of a 37-year-old civil engineer named Enric Luzán Pi who as of 30 November 2025 started the grand adventure of walking around the world (La Volta al Món a Peu), beginning in Barcelona and walking west to east. His long distance walks started in 2022 with a circumambulation of Andorra, and continued with traversing the Pyrenees, traversing the Swiss Alps via the Via Alpina Green, and crossing the Caucasus range in Georgia. He is trying to vlog his adventure daily. The channel provides subtitles in Catalan which is good for my language learning input.

Enric is presently on day 77 of his adventure and is now in the middle of Croatia. I only started watching him five days ago beginning at his Day 1 departure point at the Plaça Catalunya in Barcelona, so I have catching up to do. His daily videos are about 15 minutes each so if I watch two a day I should converge on following in real time in a month-and-a-half or so. These are a lot of fun to watch because one gets to see the landscape at a slow pace, and I like following his route with OpenStreetMap displayed in a separate window.

Enric has a video on his potential route around the world. Traversing Europe seems easy; going across Asia definitely is not, given geopolitical instability.

International Letter-Writing Month: A Zine

I’m kind of keeping up with a letter, or at least a card, every day in February. The recipient is almost random. This one’s for Richard, who has the sense of humor to appreciate it.

Zines are hard to photograph in their entirety…

Unsettling Memoryscapes

I have just finished taking notes on a couple of books I recently read to understand more of the context of my ancestral entanglements with Native Americans of the northeast. The books are Memory Wars: Settlers and Natives Remember Washington’s Sullivan Expedition of 1779 , by A. Lynn Smith (2023) and Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast by Christine DeLucia (2018). Both books examine place, memory, and commemoration following two distinct violent events, namely the scorched-earth campaign in 1779 ordered by Washington against the Haudenosaunee peoples of Western New York, and the hugely destructive King Philip’s War in 1675 in New England. Memory Wars focuses on the monuments that were placed throughout Pennsylvania and New York starting in the late 19th century to commemorate the Sullivan Expedition. Memory Lands considers local history and memory of several sites of trauma from the war, namely Deer Island in Boston Harbor, the Great Swamp in Rhode Island, the Connecticut River Valley in Western Massachusetts, and Bermuda. The two books treat place and memory from the perspectives of both the white settlers and Native Americans.

A couple thoughts from reading these books. Memoryscapes operate in parallel and different people in different communities will bring different meanings to a place and its history. And there is always a history behind monuments and markers. Who were the people who placed them? What were their values, and what sort of power was behind them?

(The photo shows a marker from the Native American Contemplative Garden in the UC Davis Arboretum.)

A Cooperative Dove

While Pica was sketching yesterday at the Arboretum, I went on a little photo stroll, having packed both my macro lens and my long telephoto lens (an Olympus 75-300mm for micro four-thirds cameras). The macro lens is meant for Arboretum outings, with flowering shrubs everywhere, but I have always found the 75-300mm lens difficult to use, especially when photographing birds. The reach is there, but it is challenging to get sharp pictures.

I’ve resolved to practice more with this lens, and a mourning dove hanging around our backyard this afternoon gave me an opportunity. We often see one or two mourning doves in the backyard, not doing much other than pecking occasionally at the ground. I took a few photos, and was happy with the focus on several of them, including this one. I think the key is to have a fast shutter speed and small aperture — I settled on 1/800th of a second at f/8, with auto ISO. But even at f/8, there is not much depth of field to play with at this magnification, so one really has to nail the focus point (the eye and face is preferred).